


Pooh: Exit Cape Light

by chr1711



Category: Apocalypse Now (1979), Racey Helps, Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage (2008), Winnie-the-Pooh - A. A. Milne
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:42:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25124866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chr1711/pseuds/chr1711
Summary: Pinny the Hedgehog leaves his woodland in Somerset to go on holiday. Things get strange. There's a stuffed bear wandering about and animals setting fire to holiday cottages. I love the smell of burning cottages in the morning. It's that smell, that arson smell...
Kudos: 1





	Pooh: Exit Cape Light

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I am aware of “Apocalypse Pooh” made by Todd Graham in 1987. What follows was written before I’d even heard of it. 
> 
> Pinny is from 'Pinny's Holiday,' a charming children's book by Angus Racey Helps, an author little known in the present day. There is also a part for Thomas Kinkade, painter, pisshead and pretty much the anti-Bob Ross.

One bright morning Pooh who was a bear of very little brain stumbled out of his hole in the Hundred Aker Wood. He had been alerted by a noise.   
A very curious noise, he thought. A most curious noise. Surely it could not be a Heffalump?

It wasn't a heffalump, it was an unshaven man in a brown jacket over a white shirt and blue trousers that somehow did not contrive to be jeans. The man staggered up to Pooh, unzipped and produced his wiener, and started to urinate.   
Ah god, he said. That' s better.  
Pooh thought it was very, very wet and not better at all. The man stopped pissing, tucked himself away and said,  
Take that, Mouse.  
I'm not a mouse, said Pooh. I'm a little bear.  
I like people being a little bare, said the man. Or a lot bare. Assholes every one of them.   
He staggered off into the wildwood.

Now wasn't that a thing, said Pooh, going back inside nad taking a shower. It was quite, quite needed.

The thing they were clearing up hadn't even started an hour ago. The little band wandered off whistling into the woods and behind them the little cottage on its rutted track, thatched roof improbable like the hope it was, too many chimneys implying a fire in every room, and yes there was fire. yellow licks at the windows, intense smoke rising up from the chimneys, the muffled screams of the inhabitants banging at the forever locked doors: screams that slowly turned into choking and died away.  
Next, said Pooh.   
I love the smell of cottages in the morning, said Tigger. It's that smell, that burning smell. It smells like ... victory.

There are few weirder sights than a hedgehog playing a guitar. One of them is a hedgehog playing a guitar and being answered by a weird weasel-like creature playing a banjo.  
Pinny sighed. He had been up river for six weeks now and he mainly needed a warsh. Only last night the mustelids that had been tracking them for days had ambushed the camp. It finished with one of them telling Pinny to get on all fours and squeal like a hedgepig, boy. And a crossbow bolt apparently from nowhere transfixing the mustelid to a tree. The other one turned and scurried through the woods.   
Typical, said Pinny as Christopher Robin came whistling through the trees, every animal narrative is humans saving the day.   
I'll let them kill you next time, said Christopher Robin. He smiled happily and put away his crossbow.   
I like my crossbow, he said. It is a silent and beautiful killer of vermin. I should very much like to lock them all in a school gym and pick the fuckers off one by one. Fuck only knows how I'll be when I get back to Blighty. This is me sober, by the way. I'm worse drunk.  
Very pleased to meet you, said Pinny. The other animals were waking up blearily. 

Pinny himself was a shy and solitary creature and had to be practically coerced to come on the river trip.   
It'll be fun they said, he said. You'll have a great time, they said. Only yesterday I was playing my guitar to some kind of bald weasel with toothpicks for legs and last night we were minding our own business making camp when suddenly one of the mice yells,  
Incoming!  
and ducks for cover. Sure as shit theres a hushing of near-silent wings and a …  
What, said Christopher Robin.

O,W,L, says Pinny. I know, they don't eat hedgepigs but even so. This thing comes down and narrowly misses making dinner of at least one of us. Nearly got eaten alive by a night-flying bird of prey. I gotta remember. Never get out of the boat.

Pooh got out of the boat. He split from the whole program (yes I know this has already been done).

If war is not holy, said Christopher Robin, man is just a stuffed animal. 

You can say that, said Pinny. I'm just a hedgehog. A little hedgehog who rode a barrel down a river. Not, however, a stuffed animal. No. But looking around the little party that had joined his own he came to a slow, stitched realisation. Apart from Christopher Robin, that was. There was no mistaking a doughface.

“You aren’t an animal,” says Christopher Robin. “You’re a cartoon sent to collect a grocery bill.”

Pinny shudders. Creatures in the obsidian night would very much like to make dinner of a little hedgepig and never mind the spines. Christopher Robin lies asleep in his bedroll, near the glowing embers of the dying fire. He does not seem concerned about the creatures Pooh spoke about before he went up river. Heffalumps. The night-bearing creatures, shouldering their way gigantically between the trees, eyes glowing red in the setting sun.   
Heffalumps, says Christopher Robin as the little band eats its repast. I think they do exist, because you know what happens if someone says they don't.  
A fairy dies, says Piglet.  
Asshole, says Christopher Robin. No, they come out of the woods and stomp you. I got chucked out of Kingston Hospital for suggesting that the Sir William Rous unit didn't exist.   
Rous? I said. I don't think it exists.   
And then I was given the rush de la bum by two bag-faced porters. Not their faults they were bagfaced, but their fault they manhandled me and threw me into the street practically under the wheels of an oncoming K2 bus.  
He shudders, thinking of their bag faces. So much the Uncanny Valley. Near human but not quite so. And what is more horrid, they once were human, too. Now, who knows?  
Piglet was pirouetting merrily in the glinting sunlight under the leaves of the tamtam trees. Somehow you knew he was going to come through this mission without a scratch.

Pinny, though. This wasn't even his world any more. Who were these creatures from someone else's storybook? A donkey, for gods sake. It kept going 'Ee-or' at him until he realised that this was the creature's name. Occasionally one would stand in a certain light and Pinny would see a seam. The creature unravelling. Perhaps the world, also.

There is a rabbit here, called simply Rabbit for he does, mostly about his friends and relations - are not exactly as they are back home, where they are simple country folk though sharp as anything when it comes to it. Mind you, you don't get much simpler (in the sense of rural and countryfied) than Pinny. He feels privileged to have been allowed out, with his mouse friend called Mouse (part-pet, part-child to him), to go on holiday up river in his little barrel. There is a whole world out here. Just a shame that most of it has decided it would like to kill him, and not even to eat. He knows there are certain doughfaces who do that, bake you in clay until you are done, but then again if you are a hedgepig, then doughfaces may eat you. So be it, and you cannot complain if they do (not that you'll be in any position to do so). But this whirling wilderface is another matter.

They were setting off the next morning when out of the sunlit edge came, as low and fast as the morning sunlight itself, a streak of orange and black meaning death. It bowled into Piglet and had him over. Pinny looked at Christopher Robin but the doughface was standing grinning and looking at it.  
The incomer bounced to an undignified halt and left Piglet to pull himself upright.  
Tigger, said Christopher Robin. I knew you'd be here somewhere. Jungle, after all. What immortal hand or eye.  
Got any drugs, Tigger said. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling over silent seas, or whatever the fuck it is.  
The only drug you need, said Christopher Robin, is one to slow you down.  
Nah mate, said Tigger. Can't slow down. I've been paragliding, you ever try that? ace man. Then I went back to Nha Trang and met a couple of Thai girls, found out why they call Thailand the land of smiles. C'mon baby take a chance with us, they said. So I did.  
Paragliding in a war zone, said Christopher Robin. That's Charlie's airspace.  
Charlie don't paraglide, said Tigger. Look, I've got some porn on my laptop. Hell man, I've been up country so long among the fucking VC I damn near forgot my own name. No Vietcong ever called me Tigger.

Piglet was wandering about the clearing with a spliff in one trotter singing,

I wish I had a pony  
for one moment to ride  
I wish i had your pony  
your dear equestrian bride  
I'm in love with my horse  
and it loves me of course  
I wish I had a pony  
tonight

I love the smell of hunny in the morning, he said. It's that smell, that sugary smell. It smells like - breakfast.

So they set off upriver again in the boat until they reached a place where the forest opened out. It was sunset and the distant yellow sun turned the sky into a golden and red tumult. The very air was golden with it. Pinny and Mouse got out of the boat. They walked hand in hand towards the shore of that impossible sea. Distant helicopters moved to and fro along the shoreline. Plumes of fire billowed up into the sky. The skeleton of a boat lay half out of the water like the bones of an ancient horse dead long before mechanisation came to these parts mouldering to bone slowly and uninterrupted like the extrotemporal dreams of antlike humans and stuffed and forest animals beneath the shadow of the endless trees. Down to bone forever.  
Mouse squeezed his hand.

Far, far above the bloodlit horizon a small honey-coloured figure wearing a red coat depended from a series of balloons, red and purple and black. Pinny could see it waving its stumpy arms and legs as it was carried off, who knew where, and the trees at the unknowable horizon burned.  
He could hear its voice carrying thinly over the glabrous sea.  
Oh bother! the little bear was saying. Oh bother! It drifted away higher and higher up and further off until the bear and its attendant balloons were no more than a distant speck against the terrifying beauty of the sky. 

Then they were back in the boat and Christopher Robin sat silent like a noble Indian not one of the degenerates who travel with scalphunters, in the prow, his crossbow to hand. Toy animals lay around him.   
They are the hollow animals, he said. They are the stuffed animals. Leaning together, headpiece stuffed with straw.

I've had such a nice holiday, said Pinny.  
So have I, said Mouse.


End file.
